Reinventing the Entrepreneur: Turning Your Dream Business into a Reality

Chapter 7

Naming Your Inbox Magazine: It’s Got to Be Good!

The hard, cold truth is that names matter, and here’s why. You may have heard of the expression “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but the reality is that people do judge books by their covers, and they do the same thing with inbox magazines, including yours. Here’s why you want to carefully consider the name for your magazine.

Back in 1982, there was a book called Astro-Logical Love by Naura Hayden (see Figure 7.1). This book sold less than 5,000 copies and eventually went out of print. A man found this book while strolling through the remainder bin in a bookstore. He flipped through a few pages and thought that the content was fantastic but the name was terrible.

Figure 7.1 Astro-logical Love sold poorly.

So he licensed the book from Naura Hayden and changed the title to How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time . . . and Have Her Beg for More (see Figure 7.2). When it was republished under this new title in 1998, it sold over 2.5 million copies, becoming a New York Times bestseller with the exact same content and the exact same author. All that changed was the title. That’s why names matter.

Figure 7.2 Just changing the name turned the same book into a bestseller.

A Name Can Make You or Break You

To come up with a name for ...